By 
By Emmanuel Otori
Customer satisfaction should be a business aim as it is vital to success for all brands. Customer satisfaction can be improved through user experience, which can have a favorable impact on your company’s return on investment (ROI).
A happy customer is a satisfied customer. Customers that are dissatisfied with your service are less likely to return. From research, after a series of poor experiences, 59 percent of customers will abandon the company, 18% tend to leave after one poor experience.
It is worthy to note that 98% of customers who have changed brands are due to user experience encountered in the past. Customer experience should be one of the things to look out for as it contributes greatly to keeping a business running.
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You can improve your customers’ experience, boost customer satisfaction, and increase retention rates by using consumer data obtained through market research and customer surveys.
What is user experience?
A user’s interaction and experience with a product, system, or service is referred to as the user experience. User Experience encompasses a person’s views on usefulness, usability, and efficiency of a product, system or service. Therefore, User experience is the experience, observation and feel users get through practical contact with a solution. This solution takes different forms which can be a product, service, project, company and other organizations.
First, for there to be a user experience surface for interaction, there has to be a representation or a plan to give a glimpse into what should be expected to give maximum satisfaction to the end user. This plan is known as the design for user experience. Providing solutions based on personal ideas of what the needs of consumers are without viewing them from the perspective of the consumers often lead to giving solutions that are not right. Customers not served well are most likely not to return.
Seeing that user experience is essential in giving value to users, offering a top notch and excellent service is important because it has a ripple effect on the customer base and return on investment. Let us consider some useful tips in improving customer experience.
How to improve user experience
➢ Feedback Mechanism: Be aware of what your customer’s desire. Therefore, listening to your customers will help you better grasp their wants and know how to meet their needs. Surveys and questionnaires are coordinated and a convenient way of gathering feedback reports.
➢ Action Step: Knowing customer’s needs to give insight on what is relevant is made easier through feedback. The action step requires you turn feedback gathered from customers into practice.
➢ Product and Service Touch: As much as you take action in responsiveness of feedback obtained, there should be a flexibility to improve the product and services you offer. It portrays the image you have of the needs of customers at heart.
➢ Feedback Evaluation: Make comparisons of the feedback before and after action has been taken. Respond to customer feedback as this gives the feel you have customers at heart.
➢ Ongoing Basis: Customer satisfaction should be assessed on a regular basis to keep up with demands in case there are changing desires as there are factors which can cause demands to change.
➢ Responsive Support: Oftentimes, customers need guidance to get the best of what they want through what you offer. A support that is responsive and quick to action is an excellent way to improve user experience. This could be live chat support, email support, on-the-phone support, In-person support and social media support. Customers will give you positive feedback if you pay more attention to their experience, and you’ll get a larger return on investment.
Not limited to the above are other approaches to improving user experience which will take effect on the satisfaction of customers. Depending on the kind of service offered and platforms showcased, the steps to improving user experience are not a “one size fits all” approach as some other will require creating personas, sketching wireframes, building prototypes, testing the model to have a feel of what the design could actually turn out to be.
Excellent user experience is beneficial as it minimizes complaints and negative reviews. Irrelevant cost and waste of resources is brought to bare minimum as services become more efficient. How about your customers? Excellent and improved services that meet their needs give them ultimate satisfaction and make them loyal. Lastly, there’s a high revenue generated from their loyalty.
Emmanuel Otori has over 9 years of experience working with 100 start-ups and SMEs across Nigeria. He has worked on the Growth and Employment (GEM) Project of the World Bank, Consulted for businesses at the Abuja Enterprise Agency, Novustack, Splitspot and NITDA. He is the Chief Executive Officer at Abuja Data School.
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